Three Early Modern Hebrew Scholars on the Mysteries of Song

by Don Harrán Z"l

Author	: Don Harrán Z"l
Publisher	: BRILL
Total Pages	: 404
Release	: 2014-10-30
Genre	: Religion
ISBN	: 9004283641

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In discoursing on music, three early modern Jewish scholars stand out for their originality. The first is Judah Moscato, who, as chief rabbi in Mantua, preached sermons, one of them on music: there Moscato presents music as a cosmic and spiritual phenomenon. The second scholar is Leon Modena, the foremost Jewish intellectual in early seventeenth-century Venice. Modena deals with music in two responsa to questions put to him for rabbinical adjudication, one of them an examination of biblical and rabbinical sources on the legitimacy of performing art music in the synagogue. Abraham Portaleone, the third scholar, treated music in a massive disquisition on the Ancient Temple and its ritual, describing it as an art correlating with contemporary Italian music. The introduction surveys the development of Hebrew art music from the Bible through the Talmud and rabbinical writings until the early modern era. The epilogue defines the special contribution of Hebrew scholars to early modern theory.

Music and Jewish Culture in Early Modern Italy

by Lynette Bowring

Author	: Lynette Bowring
Publisher	: Indiana University Press
Total Pages	: 290
Release	: 2022-03-01
Genre	: Music
ISBN	: 0253060079

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Musical culture in Jewish communities in early modern Italy was much more diverse than researchers originally thought. An interdisciplinary reassessment, Music and Jewish Culture in Early Modern Italy evaluates the social, cultural, political, economic, and religious circumstances that shaped this community, especially in light of the need to recognize individual experiences within minority populations. Contributors draw from rich materials, topics, and approaches as they explore the inherently diverse understandings of music in daily life, the many ways that Jewish communities conceived of music, and the reception of and responses to Jewish musical culture. Highlighting the multifaceted experience of music within Jewish communities, Music and Jewish Culture in Early Modern Italy sheds new light on the place of music in complex, previously misunderstood environments.

The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Music Studies

by Tina Frühauf

Author	: Tina Frühauf
Publisher	: Oxford University Press
Total Pages	: 753
Release	: 2023-10-29
Genre	: Music
ISBN	: 0197528627

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The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Music Studies is the most comprehensive and expansive critical handbook of Jewish music published to date. It is the first endeavor to address the diverse range of sounds, texts, archives, traditions, histories, geographic and political contexts, and critical discourses in the field. The thirty-one experts from thirteen countries who prepared the thirty original and groundbreaking chapters in this handbook are leaders in the disciplines of musicology and Jewish studies as well as adjacent fields. Chapters in the handbook provide a broad coverage of the subject area with considerable expansion of the topics that are normally covered in a resource of this type. Designed around eight distinct sections -- Land, City, Ghetto, Stage, Sacred and Ritual Spaces, Destruction / Remembrance, and Spirit -- the range and scope of The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Music Studies most significantly suggests a new framework for the study of Jewish music centered on spatiality and taking into consideration temporality and collectivity. Within each chapter, authors have selected what they consider to be the most important material relevant to their topic and, drawing on the most authoritative insights from historical and ethnomusicology, Jewish studies, history, anthropology, philology, religious studies, and the visual arts, have taken a genuinely inter- or transdisciplinary approach. Integrated chapter bibliographies provide material for further reading. Together the chapters form a first truly global look at Jewish music, incorporating studies from Central and East Asia, Europe, Australia, the Americas, and the Arab world. Together they span world history, from antiquity until the present day. As such, the Handbook provides a resource that researchers, scholars, and educators will use as the most important and authoritative overview of work within music and Jewish studies.

Book of the Songs of Israel

by Yael Sela Teichler

Author	: Yael Sela Teichler
Publisher	: BRILL
Total Pages	: 368
Release	: 2024-09-19
Genre	: Religion
ISBN	: 9004536477

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This annotated bilingual edition presents to readers for the first time a key Hebrew book of Jewish Enlightenment. Printed in Berlin in 1791, Joel Bril’s Hebrew introductions to Psalms constitute the earliest interpretation of Moses Mendelssohn’s language philosophy, translation theory, and aesthetics. In these introductions, Mendelssohn emerges as a critic of Maimonides who located eternal felicity not in union with the Active Intellect but in the aesthetic experience of the divine through sacred poetry. Bril’s theoretical insights, the broad range of his myriad textual sources, and his linguistic innovations make the Book of the Songs of Israel a touchstone of modern Hebrew literary theory and Jewish thought.

Bach Perspectives, Volume 12

by Robin A. Leaver

Author	: Robin A. Leaver
Publisher	: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages	: 167
Release	: 2018-10-24
Genre	: Music
ISBN	: 0252050711

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Johann Sebastian Bach was a Lutheran and much of his music was for Lutheran liturgical worship. As these insightful essays in the twelfth volume of Bach Perspectives demonstrate, he was also influenced by--and in turn influenced--different expressions of religious belief. The vocal music, especially the Christmas Oratorio, owes much to medieval Catholic mysticism, and the evolution of the B minor Mass has strong Catholic connections. In Leipzig, Catholic and Lutheran congregations sang many of the same vernacular hymns. Internal squabbles were rarely missing within Lutheranism, for example Pietists' dislike of concerted church music, especially if it employed specific dance forms. Also investigated here are broader issues such as the close affinity between Bach's cantata libretti and the hymns of Charles Wesley; and Bach's music in the context of the Jewish Enlightenment as shaped by Protestant Rationalism in Berlin. Contributors: Rebecca Cypess, Joyce L. Irwin, Robin A. Leaver, Mark Noll, Markus Rathey, Derek Stauff, and Janice B. Stockigt.

Leon Modena’s Kinah Shemor

by Leon Modena

Author	: Leon Modena
Publisher	: Skenè. Texts and Studies
Total Pages	: 142
Release	: 2023-07-26
Genre	: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN	: 8846767349

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In 1584, shortly after his bar-mitzvah, the young Italian Jew Leon Modena (1571-1648) composed an eight-line poem so remarkable that it has never been rivalled in its own genre. Known as Kinah Shemor in Hebrew, Chi nasce muor in Italian, this elegy makes sense simultaneously in both languages. It stands at the head of a little-known tradition of short poems, fragments, and fragments of memories of short poems, often composed by Jews and operating at the borders between Hebrew and romance vernaculars, Jewish and Christian communities. More than merely bilingual or macaronic, for Modena the form seems to have existed somewhere between language and music. Yet for want of a formal name, this tradition has long slipped through the cracks of the critical canon. Leon Modena’s Kinah Shemor publishes the first critical edition and English translation of the poem to take into account all three of its primary witnesses. It places Kinah Shemor in Modena’s thought as a bridge between poetry and music and between Jewish and Christian religious communities, and describes the poem’s afterlife in relation to broader questions of genre theory, critical taxonomy, and the Christian study of Jewish literature in early modern Europe.

The Making of European Music in the Long Eighteenth Century

by D. R. M. Irving

Author	: D. R. M. Irving
Publisher	: Oxford University Press
Total Pages	: 353
Release	: 2024-09-03
Genre	: Music
ISBN	: 0197632203

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Musical representations of Europe in myth and allegory are well known, but when and under what circumstances did the words "European" and "music" become linked together? What did the resulting term mean in music before 1800 and how did it evolve into the label "Western music," which features so prominently in pedagogical and scholarly discourses? In The Making of European Music in the Long Eighteenth Century, author D. R. M. Irving traces the emergence of such large-scale categories in Western European thought. Beginning in the 1670s, Jesuit missionaries in China began to refer to "European music," and for the next hundred years the term appeared almost exclusively in comparison with musics from other parts of the world. It entered common use from the 1770s, and in the 1830s became synonymous with a new concept of "Western music." Western European writers also associated these terms with notions of "progress" and "perfection." Meanwhile, changing ideas about "modern" Europe's cultural relationship with classical antiquity, together with theories that systematically and condescendingly racialized people from other continents, influenced the ways that these scholars imagined and interpreted musical pasts around the globe. Irving weaves his analyses throughout the book's historical examinations, suggesting that "European music" originates from self-fashioning in contexts of intercultural comparison outside the continent, rather than from the resolution of national aesthetic differences within it. He shows that "Western music" as understood today arose in line with the growth of Orientalism and increasing awareness of musics of "the East." All such reductive terms often imply homogeneity and essentialism, and Irving asks what a reassessment of their beginnings might mean for music history. Taken as a whole, the book shows how a renewed critique of primary sources can help dismantle historiographical constructs that arose within narratives of musical pasts involving Europe.

The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, Volume 5

by Posen Library of Jewish culture and civilization (Lucerne, Switzerland)

Author	: Posen Library of Jewish culture and civilization (Lucerne, Switzerland)
Publisher	: Yale University Press
Total Pages	: 1392
Release	: 2023-03-21
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 0300135513

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The fifth volume of the Posen Library demonstrates through a rich array of texts and images the extraordinary diversity of Jewish life during the early modern period "A rich and varied gateway into the primary source material of early modern Jewish history that is very strong on geographical diversity. A magnificent achievement."--Adam Sutcliffe, King's College London The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, Volume 5, covering the early modern period (1500-1750), presents a variety of Jewish texts to demonstrate the diversity of Jewish culture and life. These texts originate from Eastern and Western Europe, the Americas, the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, Kurdistan, Persia, Yemen, India--in short, a worldwide diaspora. They embrace historical writing and religious scholarship, liturgical expression and economic records, ethics and personal devotion, correspondence and communal regulations, art and music, architecture and poetry. The simultaneous centrifugal and centripetal character of Jewish communities during this era illustrates the distinctiveness of the early modern period in Jewish history and informs developments in world history at large. Including texts written by women, a robust collection of images, and extensive material not previously accessible to English-language readers, this volume is rich, deep, and enlightening.

The Gnostic Gospels

by Elaine Pagels

Author	: Elaine Pagels
Publisher	: Random House
Total Pages	: 250
Release	: 2004-06-29
Genre	: Religion
ISBN	: 1588364178

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Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time The Gnostic Gospels is a landmark study of the long-buried roots of Christianity, a work of luminous scholarship and wide popular appeal. First published in 1979 to critical acclaim, winning the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Gnostic Gospels has continued to grow in reputation and influence over the past two decades. It is now widely recognized as one of the most brilliant and accessible histories of early Christian spirituality published in our time. In 1945 an Egyptian peasant unearthed what proved to be the Gnostic Gospels, thirteen papyrus volumes that expounded a radically different view of the life and teachings of Jesus Christ from that of the New Testament. In this spellbinding book, renowned religious scholar Elaine Pagels elucidates the mysteries and meanings of these sacred texts both in the world of the first Christians and in the context of Christianity today. With insight and passion, Pagels explores a remarkable range of recently discovered gospels, including the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, to show how a variety of “Christianities” emerged at a time of extraordinary spiritual upheaval. Some Christians questioned the need for clergy and church doctrine, and taught that the divine could be discovered through spiritual search. Many others, like Buddhists and Hindus, sought enlightenment—and access to God—within. Such explorations raised questions: Was the resurrection to be understood symbolically and not literally? Was God to be envisioned only in masculine form, or feminine as well? Was martyrdom a necessary—or worthy—expression of faith? These early Christians dared to ask questions that orthodox Christians later suppressed—and their explorations led to profoundly different visions of Jesus and his message. Brilliant, provocative, and stunning in its implications, The Gnostic Gospels is a radical, eloquent reconsideration of the origins of the Christian faith.